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posted 03/23/07 by Jack Strongitharm Visualisation Part 4 – Camera settings and simple lighting

I retained my title as ‘Junction Jack’ last week from the webcast I did last week on Junctions and Roundabouts. Any one that missed it the recording is now available on the website and can be downloaded from www.autodesk.com/civil3dwebcasts

Well it is Friday again and we return to visualisation in Civil 3D.

We left last week with a camera looking at our surface design.
However the background is black, the lighting is dark and there is no shadows.

So this week I will take you through some simple ways to enhance the camera view and get to a good rendered scene.

1. Go to the View menu and named views
2. First of all I recommend that you create a named view of your current view to make it easy to revert back to. To do this click on Model views and click new


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Give it a name and click ok and it will create a view with your current settings


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3. Click on Camera 1, change the visual style to realistic, then click on background override and select Image or Gradient


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4. You can either apply an image or select two colours, i.e. bluey gray colours to create a sky background depending on where the project lives for how sunny and clear the sky is. (normally grey for where I live!)
Download the Sky image to get you started if you wish
Download file

To set up an image, click on image. Then browse to the image and also adjust image and set to stretch to fill the camera background



5. Now if you select Set Current, and then ok, your view will now revert to the camera view


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Lighting

1. Go to View menu, render, light and Edit Sun Properties


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Turn the Status to on, set the time and date etc to what you wish



2. Next click on Geographic Location on the eye glass icon


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Choose your region and city location

3. Next go to View menu, render and advanced settings
Here you can choose your output choice and using the presets will help you get a simple change to suit your needs



4. Complete



The last couple of week’s efforts have given you the basic fundamentals to create surfaces with different rendered materials, lighting and cameras.

In due course I will revisit this area with an update with AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 and where we can take this to a much higher level.

Good weekend all

Jack Strongitharm

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